The Dark Heart of Italy (8 page)

It gets even stranger, though. As I emerge into the hazy Milan sun of the June evening, I watch Rauti chatting amiably with journalists, talking about his bridge-building towards Berlusconi’s right-wing coalition. It’s partly wishful thinking on his part, but they have been in alliance in the past (Rauti claims to have swung the European elections the way of Berlusconi’s ‘Pole of Liberties’ when they shared the electoral ticket in Abruzzo, Caserta and Calabria). I’m amazed, not because Rauti might be on the fringes of a rather dark, right-wing coalition – it’s simply that he’s still there. A man whose organisation has been accused of almost every Italian slaughter is still in politics: smiling, suited, flirting with the female journalists. I join the huddle around him, and ask for an interview. He courteously invites me to Rome.

Italy’s capital is normally sneered at by those in the north. Many friends in Parma or Milan have never even been there. It’s a city sated with august classicism. The man-hole covers are still initialled with SPQR,
Senatus
Populusque
Romanus
. There are palm trees outside embassies and governmental palaces. Here the graffiti is very different to Parma: swastikas and celtic crosses, obscene phrases against ‘the blacks’ and
gli
ebrei
, ‘the Hebrews’. It’s a strange, beautiful place, almost knowingly theatrical. It has the perfect balance of modernity and antiquity.

The political definition of Rauti and the MSI in the 1970s was
doppiopetto
: a word that means double-breasted, and sums up that ambiguous combination of respectability, duplicity and aggression. (
Dare il
petto
, ‘to give the breast’, means to be up-front or aggressive.) The seat of the ‘Tricolour Flame’, Rauti’s political party, is a short walk from the Vatican. Rauti, the secretary of the party, sits mock-presidential between threadbare flags and ageing posters.

In 1943, at the age of seventeen, he volunteered to serve under Mussolini during what he calls the ‘civil war’. He was captured by the British in Algeria in 1945, while trying to reach Spain to ‘continue the fight’. Ironically, he graduated in law from inside a
prison in Reggio Calabria. ‘I’ve been in prison a dozen times,’ he says proudly. ‘I consider myself something of an anomaly as a politician. One Russian publication once said that Rauti, with his glasses, seems like an ordinary accountant, but he’s actually a dangerous revolutionary.’ He prides himself that he is, to Communists, ‘a black beast’. He revels in using the words ‘Communists’ and ‘Russia’, just as much as the left in general jeers ‘Fascist’ each time his name is mentioned.

‘The
anni di piombo
,’ he says, ‘were ugly, dramatic, numbing, bloody years in the history of this country. But I have no regrets. We had so many youngsters killed by the Communists. There was never any tranquillity. Hundreds of our young people from the right were put in prison. They were terribly dramatic years, in which our youngsters responded to violence with violence.’ The only thing dangerous about Rauti now is his charm, his steely politeness, his ability to brush off any question with amiable, sometimes barbed, banter. What, I wonder, does he make of the wave of trials trying to resolve the many riddles of those years? ‘There will be no legal truth,’ he says confidently. ‘There have been court-cases and counter-cases, absolutions, inquiries, new prosecutions. The current thinking seems to be suggesting that what happened to, and because of, the right was in some way connected to the CIA. There was a sort of goading of opposing extremes at the centre of which was the power system of the Christian Democratic party. One day there would be something from the left, then something from the other side, and all the while the Christian Democrats appeared as the saviour of governmental stability. It was precisely in that period that that party received its maximum franchise …’

‘So Fascists were inadvertently the puppets of the Christian Democrats?’

He becomes impenetrable, simply staring at me, waiting for the next question. ‘Listen,’ he says eventually, ‘about some things there have been partial conclusions, but about the darkest incidents there are only question marks.’

‘And your own, personal involvement?’

‘It’s true that I was involved in some things thirty years ago, but I have always been absolved. We should turn the page. All these cases are just attempts by the Communists to demonise me and the right. Times change,’ he goes on, ‘no one wears the clothes they did thirty or fifty years ago. I might admire the Roman empire, but I don’t go around riding a chariot, right? But I’ll tell you this, we haven’t as a political party renounced our history, we haven’t renounced the ideals that are generally called ‘Fascism’. Italians are at risk of physical extinction. We have the lowest birth rate in the world, bar none. I’m not racist, but there’s a limit to tolerance. There has been such a rapid influx of immigrants, from Morocco, from Algeria, from China. These people have different colours, smells, flavours, climates. Why should they be on the peripheries of our society instead of back home amongst their own?’

That evening, sitting in a bare hotel room in Via Verona, I finally find the perfect description of Italian politics. It comes from a columnist for
Espresso
magazine: ‘In Italy, as in chemistry, everything is created, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed …’ In other words, given the catalyst of time, appearances might change but the elements involved remain exactly the same. On either side of the equation, past and present, the same personalities exist, only configured slightly differently, arranged in new, confusing coalitions. It’s that which causes the surrealism and sensitivity when writing, decades later, about the slaughters or the
anni di piombo
: most of those names which recur throughout the history books or in the court cases are still highly active in contemporary politics. It seems there’s no crime or conviction sufficient to end an Italian politician’s career, no historical event that can’t be
smemorizzato
, conveniently forgotten.

It would be understandable if Italy had undergone its own peace process. But, unlike Northern Ireland or South Africa, the past isn’t faced before being forgotten; it is simply never faced. Nothing is ever, ever admitted. ‘The one constant of Italian schools,’ writes Giorgio Bocca, ‘is that of removing the history of the previous half century … the fear of history seems congenital, ordinary people have somehow understood that to talk about his
tory, to interrogate history, isn’t prudent, that there’s something inconvenient in history …’
14
The result is that nowhere in the world is as good at reinvention or rehabilitation as Italy. It’s called
gattopardismo
, the ‘leopardism’ of Lampedusa in which everything pretends to change, but remains exactly as it was.

It’s similar to the notion of
trasformismo
, which is usually used to describe the ‘revolving-door’ image of Italian governments (hinting that the actual doorman, and those going in and out of the lobby, remain for decades the same people simply in rotation). Another slightly bewildered British journalist once called it the Italian version of musical chairs, in which no chair is ever removed. The political music might change, and people will shuffle into other ‘armchairs’, but basically the same players always remain in the game.

By the time investigators, in the early
1970s
, had identified Rauti and
members of
Ordine Nuovo
as the probable perpetrators of the Piazza
Fontana bomb, the bombing of 12 December 1969 was already beginning
to seem not simply an isolated, tragic act of terrorism, but rather
a reflection of the entire ‘strategy of tension’. Suspicions regarding such
a strategy were increased by the long list of ‘illustrious corpses’ which
began to be added to the original victims of the bombing; adequate
evidence, it seemed, that Piazza Fontana wasn’t the inspiration of a
few fanatic delinquents, but rather the product of a well-drilled
organisation. (
Illustrious Corpses –
the title of Francesco Rosi’s 1975
film based on a work by Leonardo Sciascia – was fictional, but the
atmosphere was similar: mysterious murders which seemed anything
but coincidental.) As the
Presidente della Corte d’Assise di Roma
wrote in 1971: ‘it’s necessary immediately to fix a date for the trial. I
have received a list of the witnesses who have died mysteriously and
public opinion is worried …’

Pasquale
Juliano
, a
Paduan
policeman investigating Franco
Freda, another Fascist suspect, was accused of irregular conduct and
suspended; the only witness in his defence, himself a former policeman,
was found by his wife at the bottom of a stairwell. (He had
predicted his own violent death, saying to a friend: ‘You’ll find me in
the basement with a blow to my head, or in the lift-
shaft’.) Other
strange deaths followed.
Armando
Calzolari
, a treasurer for the
Fronte Nazionale
of the ‘Black Prince’, Junio Valerio Borghese, went
missing in December 1969. His body was found over a month later,
on 28 January 1970, at the bottom of a well on the outskirts of Rome.
Left-wing journalists suggested at the time that he had been killed
because he was about to make revelations regarding the Milan
slaughter. Another victim, Vittorio
Ambrosini
, a 68-year-
old lawyer
and brother of the President of the
Corte Costituzionale
, had hinted
that he knew the names of those involved in the bombing. In October
1971 he fell from the seventh storey window of a hospital. (It was
intended ‘to be passed off as suicide’ claimed one former Fascist to
Guido Salvini in April 1995.)

The problem with the Piazza Fontana trial is the way in which it seems entirely divorced from reality. There are so many words. Words everywhere, and not a shred of common sense. Documents multiply amongst themselves, which sire new pieces of paper, loosed from all logic. The longer I spent following the trial, the more it seemed like something out of Kafka. Legalese that promises clarity only ushers in confusion. One English academic often sitting beside me in the press gallery sighs: ‘You know that the bill simply to photocopy the documents of this case would be about 16 million lire? That’s five thousand pounds of photocopying!’ The transcripts of another recent trial (in which the seven-times Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti was accused and absolved of involvement in the murder of the journalist Mino Pecorelli) came to 650,000 pages. The number of documents gathered by the Slaughter Commission is now well over one million. Inevitably, after the first, spectacular accusations, media interest in the Piazza Fontana trial is ebbing away because it’s all so mind-boggling, increasingly impossible to see the wood for the trees.

I’m beginning, finally, to understand why so much scandal, even murderous, is simply ignored in Italy. It’s too confusing to find the truth. It takes so much time. There is so much legalese and mystification that it’s impossible to say explicitly, concisely,
what happened. The way in which that mystification and confusion occur is very simple. Italy has more laws than any other European country. The oldest university in the world, in Bologna, was founded for precisely that reason: to decipher and recipher the Justinian codes, the
Corpus
Iuris
Civilis
, the
Digesto
and the rest of the Roman laws. What’s important is not the principle, but the points of law. Codify, recodify, encrypt.
Quod non est in actis non
est in
mundo
: anything not written down, documented, simply doesn’t exist. The standard compliment for a history book here isn’t that the argument seems convincing, it’s simply that the book is
documentato
, that it’s based on documentary evidence. The Codice Rocco from 1931 even demanded a
certificato di esistenza in vita
: it wasn’t sufficient to be alive, you had to prove it with a document.

Italy’s great novel of the nineteenth century, Alessandro Manzoni’s
I
Promessi
Sposi
, has a lawyer who is appropriately called
Azzeccagarbugli
, ‘pettifogger’ or ‘bamboozler’. Debate relies not upon common sense or precedence, but upon producing alternative documents which trump the others in their intricate absurdity. To be convincing you have to deploy impenetrable pomp. That is how Italian power works, by bamboozling the listener: ‘Using erudite law, which is by its very nature inaccessible to the many,’ one Italian academic has written:

The irony is that Italy, so painfully legalistic, is as a result almost lawless. If you’ve got so many laws, they can do anything for you. You can twist them, rearrange them, rewrite them. Here, laws or facts are like playing cards: you simply have to shuffle them and fan them out to suit yourself.

* * *

28 September 2000. A
colpo di scen
a in the courtroom – a show stopper. Martino Siciliano, the other
pentit
o on whom the Piazza Fontana trial pivots, is due to start his deposition. Siciliano was at the same school as Zorzi in the 1960s, and is described in one paper as a ‘controversial character, psychologically flawed, divided between collaboration with justice, the need for money [and] fear of his ex-boss, Delfo Zorzi …’ In recent years, Siciliano has more or less auctioned himself to the highest bidder, accepting employment and money from Zorzi, before taking a wage and a modest, protective escort from the Italian state. Zorzi calls his former friend a ‘Falstaff’, ‘an alcoholised megalomaniac’ serving ‘Communist justice’.